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Running a dealership is damn hard. Parts and Accessories, Service, New Sales, Used Sales, and F&I can each be viewed as a business within the business; and none of them are easy businesses to run. Then you have the Accounting department, another critical department that requires time and attention. And while Marketing may not be a department, it is another very real and important responsibility of the Dealer Principal.

If you’re like most dealers, you spend countless hours trying to figure out ways to boost sales across all departments. But the reality is, there’s a difference in doing deals, and doing clean deals. And, there is a difference in making money, and keeping that money.

Unfortunately, all businesses have a Sales Prevention department. It’s that one person who answers the phone in a rude voice tone. It’s that other employee who doesn’t return a phone call as promised. It’s the sales person who doesn’t follow the process and loses the deal. It’s the Parts Manager who doesn’t replenish stocking items in a timely manner; the examples go on and on.

Then there is your Loss Prevention department. And, I’m not just talking about shop lifting and employee theft.

There are countless different ways a dealer can have holes in the bottom of the bucket.

Warranties not being filed in a timely manner and parts not getting returned, co-op improperly filed or not filed at all, obsolete P&A, and parts returns to vendors missing deadlines and losing eligibility, ancient and over-appraised used inventory, abandoned service units, contracts funding, and on and on. These are all tough best practices to master, but they are at least on the radar of most good operators.

However, the Loss Prevention department has many challenges that even the best operators can overlook. One we often see here at PSM is no capture of customer or prospects name, physical address, and email address. In analyzing over 800 dealer data bases the average dealer has 43% with missing or inaccurate physical mailing address, meaning they only capture this information 57% of the time. Email is only captured at 25% of total records, leaving a 75% shortfall, and on average the phone number is only accurately captured 56% of the time.

And if maintaining your DMS database isn’t enough of a headache, now the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) are cracking down on email marketers in an effort to combat the excessive and never-ending spammers and junk email. I won’t get into all of the details, but it’s safe to say that if you keep sending email blasts to your entire list and don’t start performing proper email list hygiene, your list will get the attention of the ISP’s and your deliverability and opens will be dramatically impacted (for more detail read Brad’s article on page 3).

Several great entrepreneurs have been quoted as saying some variation of, “You can take away all of my money, my wealth and my assets, but leave me my customer list and I will have it all back in short order.”

This is why capturing and maintaining customer data is so important.

Your existing customers who have spent money with you in the past are the most likely to spend money with you in the future. This is the number one target audience you have with regards to your marketing. The 2nd most accurate target audience to market to is those who’ve visited your brick and mortar and/or website but have yet to make a purchase from you. The 3rd group is very far behind because you don’t have any data on them. This is that group of customers who are enthusiasts of the products you sell but have never been to your store or your site. This is the most elusive and expensive group to earn their business. Except for going after nonenthusiasts and trying to convert them, which as we’ve talked about is just plain dumb.

The most effective media to market to your customer base is email, direct mail, and the telephone. Social media is okay, but it doesn’t have the 1-to-1 personal messaging capabilities, and without boosting posts nowadays, very few posts are actually seen by your followers.

Recruiting, hiring, and training, team members to manage Sales, Parts, Service, F&I and Accounting are not easy, but are do-able as there are lots of resources available for these positions.

Hiring a marketing expert who understands the unique intricacies of the motorcycle business is very, very, rare. The goal of your marketing is NOT to just spray and pray a, “Wanna Buy a New Vehicle From Us?” message every month.

Your marketing should be prioritized to build solid relationships with your most viable target audience and generate a steady flow of sales opportunities for every department in the dealership.

And our Local Web Dominator program featuring reputation management and automated email marketing as well as our Sharp Shooter marketing system all include the most viable media, to the most viable market, with the most relevant and compelling message.

Last month I talked about email list hygiene, and explained why it matters. I also touched on engagement, and I’d like to talk a little about that this month.

There needs to be a call to action, or better yet, several of them. For different departments. Cast a broad net to catch a lot of fish. We give webinars every week that show you how to do this and generate leads for every department. 
Good practice leads to good deliverability, good engagement, and the real goal, which is sales.
Spend the time to get your email sending up to snuff, and you’ll find that it will reward you with the best ROI of nearly any marketing you can do.
Give us a shout and get your invite to one of our Firestorm Email webinars where we show you the best practices in action, and how they can impact your dealership.

Talk soon. 
Brad

I’m a big fan of persistence and stick-with-it-ness. The U.S. Military Academy conducted a study of what the top characteristics were for the highest performing elite military personnel, and it wasn’t their I.Q. or athletic ability. It was GRIT, which they defined as: Perseverance and Passion for Long Term Goals. 

OBJECTIVE:

Sloan’s has been serving the Nashville area for more than 58 years. They pride themselves on not only providing the best selection of powersports toys for competitive pricing, but they also take great care of their customers after the sale.  It’s part of the magic that makes their customers so loyal and makes Sloan’s such an industry icon. But, it’s just a part of what goes into continuing to grow and build a successful customer-focused business in the powersports industry.  Curtis Sloan is constantly looking for ways to innovate and drive high quality ROI for any programs or resources brought into the dealership. He’s looking to drive sales & profits for the dealership, so his team can continue to provide outstanding products and service to their local customers.

SOLUTION:

Sloan’s has been a long-time client of PSM Marketing, implementing different elements of the direct-marketing initiatives available for powersports dealers.  Sometimes, Curtis will use all the marketing levers available to him, including the Sharp Shooter Program, the LWD program and the Firestorm website.  Other times, he’ll modify the levers he uses to ensure the highest balance of budget and lead generation (and follow-through) for the dealership.  One of the most powerful combinations for ROI that Sloan’s consistently uses is the Automated Emails through Firestorm Email, combined with the Onboarding element on his Firestorm Website. 

Through the Onboarding technology, when a customer visits an inventory page on www.SloansMotorcycle.com, they will get a dropped into an automated marketing email sequence.  This gives the Sloan’s team multiple opportunities to reach out a customer who has not yet filled out a form on their site but who is placed further down the sales funnel based on their website browsing history.

And then the automated marketing does the heavy lifting by emailing customers and inviting them into the dealership – without the sales and marketing folks having to lift a finger.  It’s all set up and running seamlessly in the background to continue generating more and higher quality leads for the dealership

RESULTS:

But, since buying this bike last summer, George has been on www.SloansMotorcycle.com over 100 times in the past 30 days.  In the Onboarding screen of the LWD program, the sales team can see EXACTLY which vehicles George is looking at and what pages he’s visiting.

Plus, George is getting automated emails sent to him as part of the Marketing Automation email sequence set up in the Firestorm email platform – which encourages George to return to the website and to visit the dealership. 

Most of the challenges with marketing is the time to implement.  With the onboarding technology linked up with Firestorm Email platform, Curtis is able to hyper-target his marketing to people who are most likely to make a vehicle purchase….soon.

This is just one example of the 600+ customers that have been browsing the site in the past 30 days alone.  Does your email marketing platform and website combination provide you with this level of killer customer and lead content?  If not, we’d love to show you how this technology works.

Dealership:

Loess Hills H-D gets its name from the corrugated, sharp bluffs formed from the last ice age, they can see just east of the dealership located new the Nebraska/Iowa Borders and the Missouri River. Just a short drive from Omaha, Loess Hills H-D has a beautiful 30,000 square foot showroom, providing their customers with whatever they need to hit the road in style. 

Solution:

This dealership isn’t new to the Sharp Shooter Program, in fact, they’ve been using PSM Marketing to help achieve their growth goals for years. Many dealers feel like they ‘own’ their past customers because they’ve purchased from them in the past. Loess Hills understands that even the best dealership in the country can increase frequency of visits, reactivate lost customers and increase their annual customer value. So, we identified past sales, service and parts customers who’ve spent money with the dealership in the last four years and lived closest to the store.

Once we identified the ‘Right Audience’, we went after them with the ‘Right Media’. We utilized over a dozen direct-marketing strategies to guarantee the target audience is reached multiple times leading up to the event. This drastically increases traffic and response to the survey site where we gather two pieces of information: 1) Contact Information and 2) What they want to buy from the dealership. This typically generates tons of leads for not only unit sales, but parts & accessories, Motorclothes and service as well.

Most marketers would tell Loess Hills H-D, that in order to sell more units, they would have to have a sale. The challenge with focusing on the sale, is that you alienate the 99% of customers who didn’t have ‘Buy a new bike’ on their ‘Top 5-things to do list’ that week. By focusing on their Ink And Iron Event Party, they got more folks to respond, and created many more sales opportunities for all departments and they got to hold more margin along the way.

February Event:

This was their third ‘Iron & Ink Party’ Sharp Shooter Campaign. There were 81 surveys completed, which created a total of 72 sales opportunities in P&A, service, and riding gear, PLUS 12 responses for a new or used bike. Skin Mechanix was there for the event and ended up doing over 40 on-site tattoos! They even rolled 7 units in February in Iowa!

Looking Forward:

What’s next? Spring. March means Spring Kickoff Parties, St. Patrick’s Day, Bike Week and many more reasons to kick off the Spring Riding Season. If you’ve missed out on January and February, this is what you’ve been waiting for.  

If you don’t already know that email marketing is one of – if not the most- efficient ways to market, particularly when combined with direct mail, you’re living under a rock.

Unfortunately, oftentimes most of the discussion of list quality is about physical addresses. I think the reason why is because it’s easy to draw a correlation between bad mailing data and our bank account. If you have a garbage mail file and spend money to send mail pieces to it, when that returned mail comes back there’s a VERY direct line from that mail piece’s postage to the bank account. That hurts. Sometimes badly.

Let’s start with the perspective that your email list is the marketing weapon in your arsenal that has the absolute highest ROI of all. It’s that important.

Now consider a major difference between email marketing and direct mail marketing:

Email is different. You have a reputation as a sender, and that reputation impacts your overall deliverability. To put this in perspective, if the number of bad email addresses you send to goes over a certain threshold, the ISPs (internet service providers) will start throttling the number of emails they even attempt to deliver for you. And the more you send to bad addresses, the more you get throttled, until you eventually get blacklisted, and they just stop delivering your mail completely. 

So how do we make sure the list we use is clean? It starts with the understanding that accuracy is critical. Make sure that the addresses are typed correctly. Read them back as they’re being input to be sure they’re right.

The real problem with doing something like this, is that many email programs and providers do a quick check to make sure you’re attempting to deliver to a valid address by checking for the presence of an “@” and “.”, which all emails have. Including the cute example above.

You also want to make sure things are spelled correctly. Some common misspellings of domains that we see are “yaho.com” “gmial.com” “sgbglobal.com” “comast.com”, among many others. Those (and literally thousands of others) are all going to bounce and create reputation problems for the senders. We have to get it right.

Recycled traps are email addresses that at some point were legitimate addresses but were for some reason abandoned and reclaimed by the provider. The provider monitors who sends emails to those addresses. Here’s the important part: they NEVER open any of the emails or engage in any way with the senders. They watch those senders over time, and if they keep receiving emails from them, their reputation takes a hit. Enough hits, and they stop accepting any emails from the sender at all. 

So, while it’s really easy to see how bad physical addresses impacts the bank account, email accuracy is no less important. Arguably, maybe more so because trouble with email deliverability not only impacts the specific bad emails and the dollars they could represent but can and WILL impact your opportunities and dollars from GOOD email prospects as well.

Talk again soon.

There are 4 pillars in marketing that can be used to determine whether any advertisement you run will be a success or a failure. Here at PSM, every campaign we fulfill abides by the following:

1. Right Audience

2. Right Media

3. Right Message

4. Right Timing

Let’s dive into the each of four pillars a little deeper

2. Right Media – When you have a specific list to go after, it becomes easier to choose the right media. Mass media like radio, TV, newspaper and billboards are not the right choice for a dealer because they attempt to target everyone, while only approximately 6% of the population in your state are riders. Plus, mass media is easy to miss with more people utilizing DVRs, satellite radio, changing the station when commercials come on, driving past your billboard and not noticing it, etc. Instead, PSM utilizes 1-to-1 media like direct mail, email, phone calls, texts, online ads, and more. Media that can specifically target a person who rides.

4. Right Time – PSM leverages major holidays to tap into the conversation going on in the heads of your customers and prospects to increase results. We also drip out several different media over a 10-day period that are all integrated into a single campaign - this really increases response rates. There’s a lot more to share. Visit www.psmmarketing.com or call 877-242-4472 for more information.

- Tory

March 20th is just around the corner and I’m beyond ready for the first day of Spring. Going on 25 years in the Powersports Industry and I still get grumpy with the cold, dark, wet, days of winter and the inherent seasonality of this business. Powersports customers truly are solar powered, and Cabin Fever is a real thing.

This year, March has five Saturdays in the month and that only happens a few times a year. In my dealership days I loved those months because I knew I had roughly 20% more opportunity to have a record-breaking month and/or smoke the numbers from the same month last year. 

What’s more fun than being invited to and attending a party with likeminded people who share similar interests?!

Most dealerships start thinking about selling with the product features and benefits at the forefront of their strategy, as opposed to the deeper desires of what the customer is truly looking to accomplish.  

When you dig into a buyer’s motive (in our industry), the majority of sales happen because the customer is looking to escape the day-to-day grind and have some fun. I know you can use an ATV or UTV for work, but that’s still a fun and exciting tool to have on any job site.

The benefits of selling results <i.e. Fun> versus just selling the product can be - higher closing ratios, increased margins, more referrals, etc.

Once the consumer is 100% product focused their natural instinct is to next focus on how good of a price they can get on the chosen product. 

This is exactly what his target audience was looking for at the time, as meal delivery options were minimal.

Events allow you to separate you and your team from your competitors by selling the results of what your customers are really looking for – a good time, and a reason to visit your dealership.

Dealers that don’t believe in, or regularly execute, events usually have one of the following perspectives. 

“They’re too much work.” Well, events do require effort. But, anything worthwhile does. As Thomas Edison famously said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

A simple event planning checklist and a meeting with your team can have you well on your way. And the cool thing about events is that when you begin to have them regularly you develop systems and the team gets trained and your events become more and more scalable.I’ve also had plenty of dealers tell me: “Events are too expensive, and I don’t have the parking and staff anyway.”

No. No. No. I was totally missing the point. Those types of shindigs aren’t practical and do cost too much and are impossible to staff for and have parking. 

And lastly, I’ve heard, “I’ve done events before and we didn’t sell anymore units than a regular Saturday”.

You’ve not only created a pipeline of future sales from those who’ve responded to your marketing, but you’ve also created future bank from those who haven’t responded. 

Contact us today at www.psmmarketing.com/sharp-shooter-program or at 877-242-4472 for more information on our done for you Sharp Shooter campaigns.